In the Next Generation Science Standards, energy is considered a "crosscutting concept" that bridges disciplinary boundaries and unites scientific disciplines. I examine how energy is represented in physics, biology, and chemistry contexts, using the reaction of molecular oxygen with sugar as an exemplar, and argue that disciplines…

This contribution looks at the garden that Friedrich Froebel (1782--1852) founded in Bad Blankenburg in 1838 in order to understand the proposal presented at the Kindergarten Model School of Madrid for training teachers in 1879 (the Schools introduced new teaching methods or systems and, at the same time, trained the teachers in their…

During language acquisition children generalise at multiple layers of granularity. Ambridge argues that abstraction-based accounts suffer from lumping (over-general abstractions) or splitting (over-precise abstractions). Ambridge argues that the only way to overcome this conundrum is in a purely exemplar/analogy-based system in which…

Foucault's panopticon metaphor frames schools as sites controlling student subjectivity. In Foucault's early work, schools, like prisons, are places of control and oppression of students' subjectivity. In an effort to figure out Foucault's conception of subjectivity and his history of the "care of the self", the relationship between…

This response argues against the proposal that novel utterances are formed by analogy with stored exemplars that are close in meaning. Strings of words that are similar in meaning or even identical can behave very differently once inserted into different syntactic environments. Furthermore, phrases with similar meanings but different underlying…

This article reviews two aspects of human learning: (1) people draw inferences that appear to rely on hierarchical conceptual representations; (2) some categories are much easier to learn than others given the same number of exemplars, and some categories remain difficult despite extensive training. Both of these results are difficult to reconcile…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Given the current impact of COVID-19, the learning experiences of Pasifika students within tertiary education has implicated their social and emotional wellbeing. Engaging in a Tongan learning approach, such as "fakalukuluku," can present a viable learning practice for tertiary students' learning experiences. This paper presents the…

Ambridge argues that the existence of exemplar models for individual phenomena (words, inflection rules, etc.) suggests the feasibility of a unified, exemplars-everywhere model that eschews abstraction. The argument would be strengthened by a description of such a model. However, none is provided. I show that any attempt to do so would immediately…

With the present forum contribution, I respond to the paper "Discerning contextual complexities in STEM career pathways--Insights from successful Latinas" by Alejandro Gallard Martínez, Wesley Pitts, Silvia Lizette Ramos de Robles, Katie L. Milton Brkich, Belinda Flores Bustos, and Lorena Claeys. I aim to augment the thoughts of Gallard…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Ambridge calls for exemplar-based accounts of language acquisition. Do modern neural networks such as transformers or word2vec -- which have been extremely successful in modern natural language processing (NLP) applications -- count? Although these models often have ample parametric complexity to store exemplars from their training data, they also…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

Between 1902 and 1913 two acclaimed educational reformers wrote several series of children's primers in the Netherlands. Jan Ligthart and Hindericus Scheepstra collaborated closely with the painter Cornelis Jetses who provided the illustrations. The series would become classics in both text and image. In this article the symbolic educational…